Mississippi’s Largest City Has a Water Crisis. Its Governor Just Signed a Bill Attacking Trans Kids

The bill is the first to be signed into law in 2021 targeting transgender student athletes.
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The same day that Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves pledged to sign its second anti-LGBTQ+ law in five years, as many as 40,000 people in the state’s largest city still didn’t have running water.

Many residents of Jackson have been without water and other basic utilities for weeks after a deadly polar vortex swept the southern half of the United States in February. The uncharacteristically frigid weather froze the pipes at local water treatment plants, many of which were forced to shut down as a result. Other facilities witnessed their pipes crack and rupture as the ice began to thaw, leading to at least 80 water main breaks or leaks in Jackson. Another 50,000 people lost power during the storm.

While running water has been restored to the majority of Jackson, things have gotten desperate for those who continue to go without. Laney Henderson, a Black trans woman who celebrated her 29th birthday just in time for the storm, said residents have started to beg their neighbors for “money just to have water just to bathe with” and some are forced to use leftover water collected from the ice and snow.

Henderson, who has lived in Jackson all her life, said she isn’t “surprised that this is happening,” citing “old pipes, old wiring, and old plumbing” that hasn’t been replaced in decades. “They should have fixed it years ago,” Henderson told them. “Things like this would not have happened.”

The disaster is just a microcosm of the years-long Sisyphean struggle with infrastructure in the city of 160,000 people, 82% of whom are Black. After elevated levels of lead were found in Jackson’s water in June 2015, it reportedly took 7 months before a warning was issued to children and pregnant people not to drink it. Residents who do currently have access to water in the city have to boil what comes out of the pipe in case it is contaminated by viruses or other bacteria.

What appalls Henderson, though, is the indifference to the city’s plight, even from Mississippi’s own leaders. While it would take a $2 billion investment to replace Jackson’s crumbling infrastructure, Reeves has suggested that the city can raise the funds by simply collecting residents’ water bills. His lieutenant governor, Delbert Hosemann, blamed the problem on its Black mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, and majority Black city council. In comments to press that critics claimed were racially coded, Hosemann alleged that things worked properly when Kane Ditto, the city’s last white mayor, was in charge 15 years ago.

As Henderson thinks about the month she has spent rationing her water supply, she sighs with a mixture of exhaustion and resignation. “When people were saying, ‘God bless Texas,’ what about Mississippi?” she asked. “We were affected, too. But no one said nothing. Hurricane Katrina, we were affected, too. But no one said anything.”

Even as Mississippi’s Republican leaders largely ignore the crisis in Jackson, the state just enacted a law preventing trans girls from playing on sports teams at school in alignment with their gender identity. After Senate Bill 2536 passed the state Senate in February and the House in May, Reeves signed the bill on Thursday. On March 4, he pledged to enact SB 2536 in a series of tweets claiming that President Joe Biden “forced the issue” by signing a January executive order directing the whole of his administration to enforce LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination in all areas of federal policy. Reeves said the move was little more than a “push for kids to adopt transgenderism.”

SB 2536’s passage coincides with a record number of anti-trans bills weighed by state legislatures in 2021. As them. previously reported, over 70 pieces of legislation have been introduced in the first three months of the year, and the majority — 56% — target trans youth. A second state, South Dakota, is poised to sign a law similar to Mississippi’s blocking transgender female student athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams.

The state of Mississippi has real issues on its hands right now, but Jensen Matar said that trans participation in athletics isn’t one of them. In his role as the equality and advocacy coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, Matar estimated that he has corresponded with “thousands of trans people across the state” and can’t name a single transgender athlete playing on a school sports team at any level. Many of the young people Matar talks to, he added, “aren't even in a position to sign up” on a basketball or softball team, facing widespread homelessness and poverty.

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“The ACLU of Mississippi is considering filing suit against the state, and so I've been doing a little bit of outreach,” Matar told them. “I’m having a problem here. I can’t seem to identify young, trans female athletes. So my question is: Where’s the problem? Clearly, there’s no problem.”

No one else interviewed for this story knew of a trans athlete currently competing in Mississippi, and when the Associated Press reached out to SB 2536 supporters earlier this month, they couldn’t cite any examples either. Molly Kester, president of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Gulf Coast Equality Center, noted that the state’s trans community as a whole is extremely small, even aside from the number of kids playing sports. According to a 2016 report from The Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, just 13,650 Mississipians identify as transgender — or .61% of the total population. Kester said trans youth are an “even a smaller subsection of that.”

While Kester lives to the south in the coastal city of Gulfport, she said the juxtaposition between what’s happening in Jackson and the state’s priorities is difficult to stomach. “People are having to drive 30 to 40 minutes to get to a location to get water, and they’re having to do this daily,” she told them., noting that the National Guard has begun distributing bottles of water at designated pickup sites. “All the stuff that Mississippi needs to pay attention to, and they’re worried about passing a bill that’s going to affect two or three people probably.”

The impact of Mississippi’s infrastructure quagmire is not merely being felt in Jackson, though. According to U.S. News and World Report, the state currently ranks 48th in the nation when it comes to the quality of its transportation network, energy grid, and access to internet service. A separate survey from CNBC found that 51% of Mississippi roads were in poor condition as of 2018, and that year over 500 bridges were closed because they were deemed “unsafe” by state regulators. That accounted for 20% of all bridges in Mississippi, and the largest number were located in Hinds County, the area Jackson calls home.

Even the water crisis isn’t unique to Mississippi’s capital. Residents of majority Black counties like Holmes and Claireborne County have also been issued frequent boil alerts and have struggled with power outages since the cold struck in February. Lacking the national spotlight that has been shone on Jackson in recent weeks, these rural areas may be the last to regain access to basic, daily necessities.

While advocates fear the passage of Mississippi’s anti-trans bill will lead to increased discrimination against already vulnerable groups, many predicted the competing crises will convince those who can to pack up and get out. This phenomenon is often referred to as “brain drain,” in which young high school and college graduates are choosing to leave Mississippi rather than build a life there. According to a report from the nonprofit news service Mississippi Today, more than 35,000 people moved away between 2010 and 2016, a total roughly the size of Tupelo, the state’s 5th-largest city. The mass migration cost the state an estimated $1.5 billion in lost revenue.

Mississippi lawmakers attempted to pass a bill in 2018 that would give tax credits to young graduates to encourage them to stay, but LGBTQ+ advocates say that wouldn’t address the root of the problem, which is that people don’t invest in a state that discriminates. Malaysia Walker, former trans education and advocacy coordinator at the ACLU of Mississippi, estimated in 2019 that 80% of her close friends had moved since the passage of HB 1523, the nation’s most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ bill. The 2016 law allows people of faith to turn away queer and trans customers on the basis of religion.

“There are people who are attempting to leave as we speak,” she said in an interview for NewNowNext. “I get calls every week.”

Walker, who has since moved to Louisiana, was not available for further comment, but Matar said brain drain is happening all over again, even before the ink on SB 2536 is dry. As part of his job, he coordinates the ACLU of Mississippi’s transgender education and advocacy program. He said that around 20% of the “key leaders” in his group either “want to move out of Mississippi or have actually made plans to move within the next few months.” In a support services call he hosts on Tuesdays for local community members, Matar claimed that 40% of participants are actively looking to relocate.

Matar said the exodus from Mississippi isn’t merely a product of its legislation. As a transgender man, he said it can be difficult to find medical providers offering hormone replacement therapy, and until recently, there was only one. A second clinic opened this year, but its ability to provide holistic care could be imperiled if Republican lawmakers pass a second anti-trans bill currently under consideration: a proposal banning doctors from offering gender-affirming treatment to people under the age of 21.

“People are leaving because they don’t have what they need here,” Matar said. “Their basic needs aren’t being met. When you add on this anti-trans legislation, the community is being kicked while they're already down.”

Activists and their supporters rally in support of transgender people on the steps of New York City Hall in New York, NY
Advocacy groups say the legislation is a “clear assault” on the LGBTQ+ community.

Still, many LGBTQ+ advocates felt they had no choice but to stay. Kester said that things have been “getting better” along the southern edge of the state in recent years, with organizers throwing the first Gulf Coast Pride in 2018. Since she began transitioning 8 years ago, she said her circle of friends “went from two to 200” and that she has been treated “fairly” and “with respect” in her workplace. Melanie Deas, a board member of the Pride Resource Center of North Mississippi, finds solace in that her organization shares space with the local PFLAG chapter in a converted Baptist church. After the pandemic is over, she said they hope to resume hosting drag shows.

Deas, who left Mississippi for college at the age of 17 before moving back for a job offer, said that some days she does think about picking up her “cat carrier and walking back north.” But every time she has that impulse, she is left with a question she just can’t shake: “If everyone leaves, who is going to stay here to fight to make this the kind of place we want to live?”

“Everyone says, ‘If you don’t like the way we live, you just go live with those Yankees,’” she told them. “I did for 22 years, but we can be better. I’m not leaving.”

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